So my sister gets engaged . . .

. . .and I have to find out second hand from someone else! My own sister -- whom I valiantly protected from harm all those years we were growing up, whom I supported through those tough years she had during the War, whose political aspirations I helped inspire -- couldn't even tell her own brother directly that she got engaged. *sob*

Sure, she emailed me later but by then I had already heard from others. *sniff*





(Congratulations Karen!)

Women Judges in Qatar

Here's an article about woman judges in Qatar that was in a local newspaper. You have to read it -- talks about how women are too emotional etc to be judges. Very non-PC.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year everyone!

Today I went to the Qatar Open tennis tournament. Watched Andy Murray (world #11) take down a Belgian player 6-0 6-2, then I looked at the schedule to see what other games were playing and relaized that one of my favourite players was at the tournament:

Daniel Nestor! The most successful Canadian tennis player of all time!

Coincidentally Nestor's match was a doubles match against Andy Murray, so I watched Murray play twice in one day. Now doubles tennis is a whole different game from singles so my money was on Nestor for sure. And he didn't dissappoint - despite Nestor never being a great singles player (his highest singles rank was #59 waaaaay back in 1999) his team quickly dispatched Murray's team 6-3 6-0.

Nestor has won the Qatar doubles title twice before, hopefully he'll make it a third this year.

Test results were okay

The test results on the nerves in my hand/arms came back as OK. It was a strange test involving running electrical currents through my arms, which made them twitch every time I got a shock. A few of the tests had some upped amperage and my whole body twitched a but from it while my arm jumped almost a foot! Anyway, the prob is not constricted nerves.

The tenderness in my hands has subsided a bit so I'm hopeful that my three week break in Canada will really give them time to heal up fully. I think I'll take my brother's advice and look into some physio exercises while I'm in Canada. My hands are now at the point that proper exercises shouldn't cause them to get worse.

why no updates?

Sadly my hands are still not better. So far been to three doctors and now the thought is that it is some kind of problems with the nerves, either their pinched on constricted somewhere. I have a neurological test scheduled for the 27th so hopefully that sheds some light on what's going on. The amount I've been typing has been scaled back heavily and I haven't driven my car in 2 months so I hope doctors get to the bottom of this soon. I'll update after I get the test results.

It's not too painful, just uncomfortable, so don't worry that I'm in agony or anything.

Since updates will be later have a Merry Xmas everyone!

An adopted dog

Thanks to the person who sent me the updated link to the Qatar Animal Welfare Society, my friend and his family stopped by on the weekend and adopted a nice german shepard cross. Your post to this blog found a dog a new home!

As for Beijing, I figured my next posts would be a simple "odds that..." format to give you a slice of life in Beijing.



Odds That In Beijing a girl coming up to you to practice English is really only interested in practising English . . . 50% (2 of 4)

Two girls I met at Tienanmen were genuinely wanting to practice English. One was really good, the other's English was pretty poor. The other girls, which I met on the shopping street and in a high-end mall, we more interested in getting me to "have coffee" at some teahouse somewhere down some alleyway. I declined and was later informed by my friend in Beijing that if you accept such offers there's a hefty bill waiting for you at the teahouse, as well as some muscle to make sure you pay it.

So, what have I been up to lately?

I haven't mentioned what I've been up to lately. Aside from work, now that the weather is pleasant a bunch of us have been organizing meet-ups on the weekend to various places in Qatar. This week we went to Sealine Beach resort south of Doha to hang out on the beach and go swimming. The week before that it was a Diwali celebration hosted by one of my Indian coworkers, and a couple of weeks ago we went to Souq Waqif, a marketplace designed to look like an old traditional souq. It has a lot of shisha cafes and restaurants so it is popular with locals. On top of that the Natural History group is up and running again so I've been going out on the field trips that they organize.

And a coworker has been organizing viewings of classic movies at his apartment every Friday afternoon. This week it is Double Indemnity. Last week it was Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of Paradise), a 3+ hour French romance hailed as the French equivalent of Gone with the Wind. I was surprised that I found it to be a good movie despite the fact I'm not fond of romances.

Other movies I've seen via "classic movie afternoon":

To Have and Have Not
Freaks
Rashamon
The Seven Samurai
Mr. Hulot's Vacation


In other news yet another person in Qatar has mentioned to me that they found my blog on internet searches, which is why I'll reiterate that you are never going to read stories about my workplace on this blog!

What about Beijing? Well I'm off to Bahrain on business for three days so I'll post a bit more about that when I return.

Sorry about the delay - updates

Wow, I have been remiss in posting. Sorry about that, with the RSI I've been trying to stay away from computing but 2+ weeks is a bit much.

Beijing: Although I hate commercials one of the things that I like doing in a new country is to watch the commercials on TV. Commercials are like a window into society and do a resonable job in reflecting things that the society cares about or are concerned with. So what did I find in Beijing commercials?

-- lots of ads for skin creams, including ones that 'whiten' skin
-- lots of ads for supplements and vitamins that will make your baby/child more intelligent, stronger etc.
-- lots of Olympic ads

what I didn't see much of:
-- ads for movies, TV shows or other entertainment
-- ads for applicances or cars
-- ads for airlines or travel

My favourite was an Olympics 2008 ad featuring the five official mascots. Now, most Olympic ads in the West are about gearing people up for it and emphasing the excitement of the games. But China is different - in China the ads were about how citizens should behave in preparation for the games! No joke! The ads featured the mascots instructing people to pick up trash, help tourists, form orderly queues and even instructed people to not talk loudly on cell phones in public transit. Bizarre. Obey Citizen!


Currency peg: talk in the media is that despite all the talk from the Central Banks that they will not de-peg or revalue the currency (due to the $US dollar decline) at least one of UAE or Qatar will drop the peg within 6 months. Interesting news, I hope they do that here, it means my money is worth more.


My trip back to Canada in January is booked. Good news is that I will be visiting Vancouver for the first time in about three years -- it'll be nice to see everyone again. Bad news: not visiting Bermuda en route. I couldn't get the flights to work out so I'm going to Vancouver via London rather than the US. Maybe next year Bermuda.

The Return from Beijing.

Okay, I'm back! Had a great time and it'll take a number of posts to explain it all. First, the conference. The conference was known as the “World Congress of Scientific Inquiry and Human Well-being: Improving Science Spirits and Building Harmony Society”. The conference was more academic and serious than a TAM with dozens of professors and researchers giving 15-minute talks on a number of topics. Some of the local talks were . . . different, with titles like “The sci-tech culture leads the construction of a harmonious society” or “A special case reflecting the worship of numbers: the numeric metaphors in Chinese internal dan theories” but some were more down-to-earth and discussed items like the results of science teaching initiatives in rural schools. Western presenters included Peter Atkins, Scott Atran, Daniel Dennett, Murray Gell-Mann, Lawrence Krauss, Edward Kruglyakov, Jean-Claude Pecker, Paul Kurtz, and a number more. Most of the time the various presentations were held simultaneously in two rooms so I could only see about half of them.

The talks were only 15-minutes, which didn’t really give much time. Only two talks that I attended were affected by having to stop so that the Chinese interpreter could translate for the audience, essentially only giving the speaker about 8 minutes! Pecker and Kruglyakov’s talks were affected, and Krauss and Atran, once seeing this, refused to stop their talks for translation, telling the hosts to translate a summary afterward.

For talks in Chinese a translator sat next to us foreigners (at any given time 3-8 of us) and would verbally translate the talk to English as it was given, so Chinese speakers did not have to pause for translation. It generally worked out well but sometimes the translators would not know how to translate if a talk got very technical. All-in-all though having the translators was much appreciated. With only 15-minutes though none of the talks could go into much depth.

What was interesting was that the Chinese talks were heavy on ideology and key buzzwords, similar to most speeches you hear from Comm Party meetings. Lots of mention of “science spirit”, “embracing science popularisation”, and “harmonious society” in almost every talk. It was sort of a cross between a science conference and Communist meeting. I’ve been told by westerners at the conference who live in China that this is fairly typical for speeches in China --and let’s not forget that all of the Chinese speakers were from a government-approved list.

As for the non-presentation part of the conference it was great! With so few foreigners there, I think there were all of about 8 of us there who were not giving presentations, we were invited to all of the events and tours so you got to chat with many of the speakers. Any distance between speakers and attendees didn’t exist: Jean-Claude sat down at our table for lunch one day, Gell-Mann the next, Krauss joined our table for dinner, Dennett went out with us to the TGIF for a drink one afternoon and so on. All of the speakers were very approachable and this was no exception: no attitude, just regular folks looking to meet with other attendees and speakers to chat. Just that instead of 900+ people at TAM (the Vegas conference I went to last January) there were about 30 of us, Westerners that is. Our hosts provided us with lunch every day, two banquets with entertainment (acrobats, magician, ladies playing traditional instruments), front-row seats at a Chinese Opera, and a tour of the Great Wall. I appreciated all of the work that they did for us, they were wonderful hosts.

One amusing thing was that because there were so few foreigners a lot of the local attendees assumed that I was “somebody”. I got asked many times what my talk was going to be about and lots of people were taking my photo during the sessions. Any westerner was a minor celebrity there.

I had a few days after the conference so did the usual sights: Forbidden City, Temple of Heavan, Summer Palace (my favourite), Lama Temple, acrobat show, some shopping for pearls & jade. Another attendee stayed over for a couple of days so we did most of the sights together, everyone else had moved on to a week-long tour to Xian etc. In the evenings I usually met up with a guy I met on the JREF forum who showed me various bars to sample the Beijing nightlife.

I'll post more about the sights & sound of Beijing over the next week or so.
For those of you on the e-album list it is on its way.

I'm off to China!

Heading to the airport in two hours for my trip to Beijing. Because the Eid holiday starts today this will likely be one of the busiest times at the airport this year - so I'm giving myself 3 1/2 hours to check in and board.

I took some time today to review my Lonely Planet guide to Beijing and they had a bunch of phrases at the back for people to say if they need to get key info across in Mandarin. So I tried it out on a Chinese coworker (Singaporean actually) to make sure that I had the pronounciations correct. It was great doing this because I discovered:

-- the english sayings in the Lonely Planet are not phonetic;
-- Chinese people cannot understand a word that I say in Mandarin; and
-- Saying things from the guidebook is a great way to get Chinese people to laugh hysterically, which should be useful to break the ice at parties.

For example, one of the words Lonely Planet lists as 'bushi'. How would you proounce that reading from the book? Bu-shi is my guess. How is the word really pronounced?

bu-suh

So why the %@$&@# does the guide say bushi ??! This was repeated with most of the words I tried - my colleague had no clue why the book translated them this way, but laughed and laughed at my attempts to say them.

Also, from the limited phrases given in the guidebook it appears Lonely Planet readers are generally concerned with things like:

"use the meter please"
"where does this bus go?"
"where is the nearest gay nightclub?"

but the guide is silent on "where is the toilet?" or words like "left" "right" or "down the street two blocks". Apparantly it is much more vital for Lonely Planet readers to find gay nightlife than a washroom. (I don't even want to think about why - is that even legal in China?)

Anyway looks like I'll stick to English as much as possble. See ya in 10 days!

Road fatalities and other updates

Geez it's been two weeks since last update. Hands are improving but not 100% so I'm still taking it easy. General updates:

A comment was recently posted on an old blog post that the website for the Qatar Animal Welfare Society has moved to www.qatarpets.org . Coincidentally the day before I was talking to a colleague who recently moved here, his family was thinking of getting a pet. So thanks to the person who sent the update.

The newspapers recently reported that last year Qatar had 207 road fatalities, which works out to approximately 6.9 deaths per 10,000 vehicles on the road. For comparison this webpage has the deaths per 10,000 cars rate for most countries in the world for 1996, in the US the rate was 2.0, Canada's was 1.8. Thus 6.9 is pretty bad. The Government has just passed tougher laws and installed more speed cameras in an attempt to crack down but people are skeptical as to whether it will be enforced. Time will tell. I think the problem is not the laws, it is just that enforcing those laws, and punishing reckless drivers, is weak at best.

[update: I think my rate calculation for Qatar is overinflated, please see my post of 28 January 2011]


I forgot to mention that it's Ramadan now. Restaurants are closed all day, only opening in the evening and alcohol is not for sale anywhere in the country. All the Muslims are fasting now so it makes for cranky drivers near the end of the day. I like Ramadan though because the morning commute is much better and we get to leave work 2 hours early. For people into nightlife the only option is house parties.

A week to go before I'm off to Beijing! I'm definately looking forward to it.

RSI flare-up

Sorry everyone but my RSI is kicking up again. Looks like I didn't rest it enough. Have to relax and cut-down on the typing and computer use. Damn, RSI is annoying.

So, about Abu Dhabi

So what was I doing in Abu Dhabi you ask? Well Monday September 3rd was a national holiday so everyone in the office was planning four-day getaway vacations by taking Sunday off. A coworker and I were thinking about going to Damascus to look around.

Then one day in August an announcement was made from the Palace. Sept 3rd is no longer a public holiday! It will instead be replaced by a public holiday on Dec 18th. (In an absolute monarchy things like that can happen, with a wave of an Emir's hand public holidays can disappear.) Suddenly those 4-day weekend plans ground to a halt.

I still wanted to do something that weekend so I went down to Qatar Holidays to see if they had any deals for a 2-night getaway. Sure enough they had a deal that was too good to pass up - a shocking reasonable getaway to nearby Abu Dhabi to stay at the Emirates Palace Hotel.

Definately check out the link, this place is supposed to be one of the grandest hotels in the world (there is also a wikipedia entry on it. So with such a good deal I figured what the heck!)

I emailed my friends Mike & Elushka in Dubai to let them know I'd be around and they decided to drive down and stay a night as well.

Well the place was truly awesome - and huge! Upon getting to check in someone came by to give me a cold towel, followed by someone else with stuffed dates, followed by another person with water & arabic coffee. A clerk showed me to my room (something like 300m away in the East Wing) and at the desk in my room is where I signed all the check-in paperwork. Meanwhile the bellhop brought my bags and a butler(!) came in with a glass of orange juice. Once the check-in clerk left the butler showed me the various room features, including the 52" plasma TV. So far I was impressed. All non-alcoholic drinks in the mini-bar were complementary as well.

So the next day was spent lounging around the West Wing pools with Mike, Elushka and their son Keelan. The West pools had a current pool that went inb a circle for around 200m, plus waterslides. We had a great, and relaxing, time.


The next day I stayed at the East Wing pool, and hung out at the pool bar or relaxed on a lounge chair. I didn't do anything fancy or see the sights in Abu Dhabi I'm afraid, maybe next time.

So was it worth it? At the heavily reduced price that I got it was worth a one-time splash in luxury. Would I do it more often at that price? No, still a little pricey (one beer is approx $13). Would I do it at regular prices of $500+ a night? Heck No!! But it was nice to really experience how the other 1% of uber-rich people live, if only just once.

Brief updates on currency

Abu Dhabi was cool, more on that later . . .

As for the unified Gulf currency planned for 2010, an economist says it is unlikely to happen. Oman has backed out, Kuwait removed their currency peg, and the UAE is starting to waffle on the idea. Looks like a common currency is out. Shame, I appeciated how much introducing the Euro simplified things, and a GCC currency could have done the same.

In other banking news looks like the Central Bank is getting "tough" with banks lending money to individuals. Now such loans are capped at something like QR2.5 million (a paltry US$686,000) and the maximum repayment term is 84-months. That's cracking down?? No wonder these banks have so many defaults if they are willing to lend large sums like that over 7-years.

Out for the weekend

Taking a quick weekend getaway to Abu Dhabi. My friends Mike & Elushka are going to drive down from Dubai and meet me there so it should be a fun weekend. None of us have been there before so we'll take a bit of time to see the sights. I'll post again when I return.

Another journey

Well everything has been finalized and it looks like I have another conference coming up in October.

So where am I heading this time? . . . .



I can’t quite believe it myself . . .



Beijing!!


Yes, I’m off to China in October! The conference is three days but I’ve taken some time off so will be there for a week to see the sights. Got my guide book, already spoken to a few people who have been there – I can’t wait to go now.

My one hesitation is the air pollution, some types of air pollution can sting my eyes fiercely, so I can only hope that I’ll be okay while I’m there. If the air quality really affects me then this trip could turn out to be a misery instead of interesting. I’ll try to arm myself with eyedrops before I go.

Forbidden City here I come!

Here she is!

Happy Birthday Karis!

A Happy Birthday wish to my niece Karis. I'll try to dig up a photo for the blog - she's so cute! She is one of those rare children who rarely cried through the night, thus letting Mommy & Daddy get a decent night's sleep. She calls me "Unkee Glen", mostly with "No" around it, such as "No, Unkee Glen, no!" whenever I do something she doesn't want me to do (but she's cute when she says that too).

It is an unfortunate part of living so far away that you rarely see family. I only visit Canada once a year, so it has been a while since Karis has seen Unkee Glen. Hopefully she recognizes me when I visit in Janauary!

Have a wonderful Birthday Karis! *kiss*

Liquor Permits

So after being here about 15 months I finally broke down and got a liquor permit. You see in Qatar you need a license to have alcohol at home, otherwise the only place to buy it is a hotel bar. I wasn't too fussed about it so I didn't bother with the permit but I'm finding the prices at bars so outrageous (~$8-9 a drink) that I decided if only so save money I should get one. That Ramadan is coming up (when even the bars can't serve alcohol) is a factor as well.

So I had to fill out a form, get copies of my passport and work permit, and get a letter from my employer noting:

-- that I am allowed to have a liquor permit. Can't get one without employer permission.
-- my salary, as it affects how much I can purchase a month.
-- my marital status (??)
-- where I live (??)

oh, and pay a QR1000 ($US275) refundable deposit.

So I go to the only liquor store, wait an hour at the permit office with about 10 other guys (only men were there for permits for some reason), then got a permit card with my picture on it so I could buy some alcohol right away!

My monthly limit was mind-numbing. For a country that restricts alcohol I certainly wasn't expecting the limit that I got. Think 4-figures $US! A month! I'd have to open a small bar to go through that much booze.

So now I'm stocked up with some spirits to get me through the next couple of months. I shouldn't need to go to the bars now if I want to drink something, especially since and entire bottle of spirits from the store costs less than 3 drinks at a bar.

Premium vs. Regular gas

I had always wondered what the difference in octane between premium, super and regular gas was supposed to do. A little research came up with some surprising results. The difference is very little, except price of course. Apparantly lower octane can cause pinging, but only if your car engine is designed for high octane fuel (check your manual for recommeded octane) and it doesn't have some kind of engine stabilizer to prevent pinging, which almost all cars have. So in other words paying extra for premium or super gas is usually a waste of money.

While I could like to all sorts of technical websites, the guys who run Car Talk, a popular North American radio show about cars, do a better job of descibing the situation. Read about it here. My favourite quote:

We don't believe that any modern engine that claims to require premium will be damaged by using regular unleaded judiciously. Neither do any of the sources we've checked with — including the American Petroleum Institute, the American Engine Rebuilders Association — even a chemist (who would rather go unnamed) at a major gasoline company.

So save some money and use regular gas!